He decided that if his mission was successful, he would have to move his family. Again. Another exile. There were rumors that the Israelis and the PLO were holding secret talks. More than ever now, he found himself hoping for their success.
The car coasted to a stop. Omar looked over at Asawi, who shrugged in slight embarrassment.
“I am sorry, Omar,” he said. “Procedures, you know. We are only a few meters from the main road.” He touched a button, and the electronic door locks popped up. He smiled. “I trust that you will not need your cane again for anything but walking.”
Omar opened his door and stepped out, pulling his beret onto his head as he looked around. Through the black fingers of the trees he could see the white lights of Tavern on the Green. He was in Central Park.
“And Omar,” said Asawi from the black rectangle of the compartment. “I am pleased that I was able to dissuade you from leaving our employ. Auda’ nak. Farewell.”
“Allah yihfazak. God keep you,” Omar replied as he gently closed the door. He straightened up, took his bearings, and began to walk.
Asawi watched the little figure recede toward Central Park West. Then he waved at the driver, and they proceeded in the opposite direction.
He reached for the telephone, dialed a number, and spoke in Farsi.
“Book me on the next flight to Tehran.”
He snapped the cellular into its cradle, opened the cabinet under the bar, and came up with a small flask of Dewar’s. He poured himself half a tumbler, neat, then tuned the radio to a country-and-western station, sat back, crossed his ankles, and sipped.
He did not care to be in New York when Martina Ursula Klump began to vent her rage.
Chapter 6: The USS Intrepid
The hurtling roar of the flaming Japanese Zero had long since faded into the Pacific winds, the jagged wound where the pilot had plunged his spinning machine through the flight deck of the carrier now cauterized and healed. Where a burst of smoke had choked surviving sailors, the only cloud that hung there now was of multicolored balloons. Where the flash of a two-thousand-pound bomb had murdered half the crew of the hangar deck, Christmas bulbs festooned the steel cavern. And where frightened fire crews had battled floods of raging aviation fuel, struggling barmen fought to quench the thirsts of partygoers.
The thundering impacts of war were merely memories now, and the great centerpiece of the Pacific Fleet had been made over into a sea-air-space museum, her keel embedded in the sludge of the Hudson River, her flanks fettered to the dock at Pier 86. Filled with artifacts of American aeronautical history, the flight deck crowded with silent aircraft, she was an incongruous fixture of the west side of Manhattan.
The museum usually closed at dusk, yet various organizations had discovered an exotic atmosphere in which to hold rousing social bashes. By night, especially during the holiday season, revelers dressed to the nines arrived at the Intrepid’s gangways.
This evening it was the Soldiers’, Sailors’, and Airmen’s Club of New York City, whose party organizers gleefully wondered if the ship might actually pitch and roll at her moorings. Even though the major television networks had finally stopped showing that video clip of a smart bomb diving into Saddam Hussein’s Air Force Intelligence headquarters, the pride of Desert Storm was still fresh enough to attract a thousand veterans to one last postwar bash.
The night was still and clear, though had there been precipitation, it would certainly have fallen in burry flakes. Inside the pier’s entrance gate, the flight deck of the carrier loomed high overhead, its aircraft’s wings and tails jutting into the sky like a netful of shark carcasses. The sloping sides of the hull were bathed in the green glow of ground lights, and the four entranceways to the ship were bright-yellow rectangles at the tops of zigzag gangways.
Many of New York’s municipal VIPs were attending the event, for the chance to revel among uniformed American warriors was an opportunity too rare since 1945. Limousines drifted through the gate, a contingent of NYPD cops checked the credentials of guests on foot, and officers and other ranks in full regalia enjoyed the white-gloved flash of a Marine MP salute.
A figure hugging a large metallic Coca-Cola cylinder skirted the long parade of revelers, begging pardon as he waddled toward one of the policemen. The hood of his black sweatshirt was drawn tightly around his face, covered further by a USS Intrepid crew cap, and the back of his red museum parka was emblazoned with the ship’s silhouette. The wet cough of a winter cold racked the man’s hunched shoulders, and as he stopped for clearance, a policeman winced under the spray of spittle. “Come on, man. Effin’ thing weighs a ton,” the crewman whispered hoarsely. The cop waved him through with a gesture of disgust.
The crewman moved more quickly now, past the limos in the parking lot, until he slowed near the stern. The caterer’s truck was parked nearby, and he waited until a trio of shivering cocktail waiters appeared at the tailgate to be handed armfuls of replenishment. Then he fell in just behind them as they weaved their way up through a crowded gangway, parting the partygoers with “Comin’ through! Heads up!”
He passed through the double entrance door and was met by a blast from the horn section of a big band. The party inside the hangar deck was already in full swing. Marines in blue dress tunics, army officers in buttoned-up olive, and naval aviators in winter black twirled women wearing sequined gowns beneath the flashes of a disco ball. Huge military displays, including a Gemini space capsule and an array of antiship missiles, were suspended from the flight deck like Christmas ornaments in the salon of a giant. A full dance floor of interlocking wooden planks had been laid, so that as the band segued into “Stompin’ at the Savoy,” the iron cave erupted in the thunder of a stampede. The orchestra was jammed atop the roof of a ten-foot observation deck, and a solo trumpeter fired high C’s down into the crowd.
Around the perimeter, cash bars had been set up like field messes. The crewman worked his way toward the nearest table, where a perspiring bartender spotted him and shouted, “Thanks. Anywhere.” He set the canister down and stepped away to watch the crowd. A steady trickle of servicemen hurried toward the rest room at the stern. Visor down and hands jammed into the pockets of the parka, he followed.
As with most naval vessels, the latrine had been designed for volume rather than aesthetics. Banks of urinals and stalls wound back and forth, and he had to squeeze past soldiers washing at the sinks. He found an empty stall in a far corner, went inside, locked it, tore off the baseball cap, and quickly freed the choking drawstring of the hooded sweatshirt.
Martina Klump shook her head violently, her blond hair cascading in a yellow halo until she stopped and it settled over her face. She blew out a long breath, swept the strands from her eyes, and continued with her task.
She removed the parka and hung it on a steel hook. Her high-heeled pumps, which had been slung beneath her armpits from a black string running across her neck, joined the parka. From the belly pouch of her sweatshirt she pulled a folded Bloomingdale’s shopping bag, a lipstick, mascara tube, perfume vial, a folding hairbrush, and a black box purse on a long silver chain. She set the collection down on the cover of the commode.
Very carefully, she pulled the sweatshirt over her head. The hem of her black tube gown had been raised and pinned to itself beneath her arms. She slipped her sweatpants down to her ankles. Her stockings were unmarred, the clips and garter belt in place, the emerald silk undies that matched her bra still as wanton as she’d planned. Of course, the sweat socks and sneakers did nothing for the image, but that would soon be rectified.
She unpinned the dress and smoothed it down. It was long-sleeved to the wrists, but its elasticity would leave no doubt regarding her figure. She reached up and touched her throat, finding the strand of pearls intact.
She removed her sneakers and socks, pulled her feet from the sweatpants, freed her pumps, and slipped them on. The folded remnants of her Intrepid crewman went into the bottom of her shopping bag, and from the small vial o
f Estée Lauder she daubed her throat, wrists, and underarms, then applied the mascara without a mirror. When she finally took a deep breath, unlocked the stall, and stepped out, she was carrying only the bag, the purse, and a posture of arrogant bravado.
She strode past two large Marines who were gripping the flush handles of their urinals as if the ship were swaying in a storm. Then she stepped up to the nearest sink, dropped the shopping bag, and leaned into the mirror to apply her lipstick. She was pleased with her emergence, a doubtful butterfly now reassured, and as she quickly brushed out her hair, she realized that the gaping faces of three army officers were staring back at her from the glass.
Martina smiled as she turned to them, recovered the bag, and said, “As usual, gentlemen, the line in the ladies’ room is unbearable.”
She strode from the latrine, giving her gait enough hip to elicit a drunken wolf’s bray. At this rearmost section of the ship, caterers hustled like a frenetic mortar team at the crux of an infantry battle, stripping packings from cocktail canapés, chips, and dips. Martina pressed her shopping bag into a pail of torn Ritz boxes.
She plunged into the crowd, walking along the shore of the dance floor. Couples staggered laughing from the fray and others hurried into it, and within a minute she had spotted twenty other blondes in sleek black dresses, but she was not discouraged by comparisons.
Martina knew that she could probably have dispensed with her deception as the museum employee and just purchased a ticket for the event. It was unlikely that she had been tracked as she emerged from the building where she rented a flat under a cover name, rode two different subway lines to the Lower East Side, hailed a taxi, and stopped at a deserted corner in the restaurant supply section of the Bowery, where Iyad handed her the canister. Nothing in her surroundings had alerted her. At times, her own tradecraft annoyed her for its paranoiac caution, yet it was ingrained and she performed it by rote, like the warm-up of a musician before a concert.
More and more, she sensed a discomfiting linkage between herself and the consular bombing, for the concept of coincidence was not in her lexicon. There was a troubling thread there, set to humming at high pitch by the photographic image of Benjamin Baum. She recognized the tune. The lyric would come later.
And Omar’s message, whispered during a brush contact on a crowded bus, certainly had the opposite of its intended effect. How dare he and his masters tell her how to run a mission? Frogmen and limpet mines? The idiots. As a professional, she would have accepted a simple order to abort, but she reacted with disgust to the insistence on a change of tactics. I am a surgeon. If you’ve hired me, then shut up, go to sleep, and let me cut. She had wanted to kill him right then and there, but he was only the messenger, and she chose not to respond at all.
She reached the first drink table and circled to the bartender’s flank. Despite the cluster of male hands stretched out to him like beggars, he ignored them and said, “Ma’am?”
“Stoli, please.” Martina smiled. “Rocks.”
She took the drink, lifted it in a silent toast to a Marine lieutenant who was glancing at her chest, and steadied the glass when she realized the ice was trembling. It would be her only alcohol of the evening, yet she wanted it now and drank it quickly. Her quake of nerves surprised her, no different than a schoolgirl’s at a Sadie Hawkins dance. She knew how she looked; the mirrors did not lie. But Mussa’s words had set her to wondering if she could do it, the memory of their morning argument adding anger to her doubts.
“You do not have to do this, Leila.” His voice had grown louder as he watched her lay out her “gear.”
“I do.”
“Not this way.”
“What way, then, Mussa?”
“A mugging will work just as well.”
“Ah, I see.” She had scoffed. “Four men struggling in the street. That will not attract attention.”
“We can follow him. To a deserted place.”
“And suppose his plans do not include such a place? If he enters a taxi and disembarks at the Plaza Hotel?”
Her logic infuriated him, her will to use her body even more so.
“Then we can lure him.” Mussa grasped hopelessly, falling neatly into Martina’s strategy.
“Precisely what I have in mind, Mussa.”
“But not this way!”
“Why not? He will be a military man, and your way will bring on a fight and we will have ourselves a torn and bloody uniform.”
“Sharmootah.” He hissed it as he stomped away from her in disgust.
“What did you say?” But she had certainly heard the Arabic for “whore.”
“It is the way of a harlot!” His face was bunched like a frustrated child’s as he screamed at her.
Martina watched him, scorching him with her eyes until he turned away and collapsed into a chair. In Lebanon, she had had men flogged for such insubordination, until they learned that she was not from the same mold as their subservient sisters and mothers of the Shia villages. No one of Yadd Allah ever challenged her this way now, but Mussa was not just another soldier, or a simple underling. He was family, a tie in Moslem heritage not so easily broken by widowhood.
Martina had been wedded to Hussein Hawatmeh, Mussa’s oldest brother. Granted, the union had been brief. There had been no nuptials to speak of, no cottony chiffons, blushing bridesmaids, morning coats, or pipe organs. No limousine to whisk the couple off to sunny isles for languid lovemaking and fantasies about their future. It was a ritual of respect, a public promise before God, for Martina and Hussein wanted each other, yet could not breach the moral codes they preached. So the bride wore the veil and jallabiya of the Beka, and the groom wore camouflage. A muezzin warbled from a minaret as a mullah blessed them in the sun, which glinted sharply back from lathed steel, for the wedding party carried Kalashnikovs instead of flowers.
Perhaps no black widow’s mate had ever been more doomed, for when Hussein met Martina, his headstone was already being chiseled. His indoctrination as one of the Isargaran—Lovers of Martyrdom—had been completed at the Marvdasht facility near Tehran, his offensive-driver training honed in Assayda Zaynab, near Damascus. It was left up to Martina to complete the process, send her men to reconnoiter the Israeli positions north of Marj Ayoun, select a vehicle that would mirror one the soldiers usually waved through, carefully design and mold the composition of RDX Hexogene and Pentaerythritol TetraNitrate, as well as build in the double-insurance detonator that would be activated by Hussein’s own hand but could also be exploded by remote radio control should the martyr’s courage fail him.
She realized somewhat later that the mission had been a test: not of Hussein’s loyalty and courage, but of her own. And not long after the concussion had wiped him and twelve Israelis from the earth, she decided bitterly that he in turn had been subjected to a trial of his indoctrination, ordered to wed and bed this foreign woman, thereby testing both their mettles. Not that it mattered, for his ardor for Martina’s body could not have been injected by any North Korean psychologist. And she, too, was surprised at her desire for him, and at the grief that followed. She had rebirthed herself in Lebanon, and with that transformation came an adolescent passion, the unencumbered desire that besots teenage heads and is rarely matched for later lovers. And between the day that Hussein first descended from a dusty jeep into the camp, and the dusk just four months later when he left in much the same way, Martina fought against the hope that he might flee, leave her a note begging forgiveness for his cowardice, a pledge of love greater than for Allah, a promise to rendezvous at some faraway place, in a near year.
But instead he killed himself as planned. It was quite a test to put to a young bride.
The event also shocked Mussa Hawatmeh, waking him from a slumber of submission to Hizbollah, and while in public he celebrated at Martina’s side, together they secretly mourned. They decided never again to be manipulated by unseen hands and took their loyal men away, first to enclaves in the south, where they engaged in bat
tles of their choosing, and later out of Lebanon altogether. But Mussa could not escape the tenets of his culture. According to Islam, he was now responsible for Martina, the widow of Hussein.
Martina knew that had they continued living in the Middle East, she would have been obliged to marry Mussa. Yet inasmuch as she was having none of that, he was surely doubly frustrated. Did he love her? Perhaps not, but he surely loved the memory of Hussein, and the idea that Martina would bed another man, even for the sake of the cause, was abhorrent. . . .
She looked into the bottom of her glass, watching the last of the Stolichnaya drain into her mouth. The flutter in her stomach told her that she was risking much more here than her own ego, for having insisted on this course of action, she now had to prove it operationally correct. With the crucial stage of the mission about to be launched, it might be dangerous to face her men empty-handed.
It had been some years since she had seduced a stranger. Her figure was in fine form, her face belied her age, and the scent that rose from her throat had a sultry tang. But like a retired sniper, she wondered if she could still hit the mark.
Relax, she ordered herself. This field is full of stags. Take your time.
The band slid gracefully into a Viennese waltz, and she found herself looking up into the face of a tall, elegant man offering her an elbow.
“May I be so bold, ma’am?”
He was physically wrong for her purposes, much larger than Mussa. His sandy hair was flecked with gray and his uniform was the dress black of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, but he would be good enough for a warm-up.
“You may.” She set her glass on the drink table and took his arm.
The field-rank officers siezed the floor, for apparently those of lower echelons were untrained for the strains of Strauss. Martina’s partner scooped her back, joined his free hand to hers, and began to spin her. He was proud, graceful, and quick, his gaze fixed upon some distant point as they rose and fell over swells of three-quarter time. He moved in silence, like a soldier of another generation. The room’s perimeter became a kaleidoscopic haze, and clasped against a Prussian posture, the ebony cloth and shiny brass, Martina danced again with her father. . . .
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